[2][3] The screenplay for the film was written by Ben Hecht, and adapted by Robert E. Kent, Frank P. Rosenberg, and Victor Trivas.

Andrews plays Mark Dixon, a ruthless and cynical metropolitan police detective who despises all criminals because his father was one, and finds himself trying to cover up his own accidental killing of a suspect in a murder case.

At a floating crap game in New York City run by gangster Tommy Scalise, the beautiful Morgan Taylor decides to leave for the night, with or without the man, Ken Paine, who brought her there.

Dixon cannot bear to tell Morgan the truth, but he arranges to pay for a top lawyer for Jiggs, one who has never lost a murder case.

After a fruitless confrontation with Scalise, Dixon writes a letter, addressing the envelope to Inspector Foley and marking it "to be opened in the event of my death."

As the gang attempts escape in a car elevator, Dixon manages to delay them by stalling it until the police arrive.

The New York Times film critic, Bosley Crowther, while thinking the script was too far-fetched, liked the way the dialogue was written, and the acting as well.

He wrote, "...the plausibility of the script by Ben Hecht, an old hand with station houses and sleazy underworldlings, is open to question on several counts.

Not so, however, his pungent dialogue and unfolding of the plot, which Otto Preminger, who guided the same stars through Laura several seasons back, has taken to like a duck to water and kept clipping along crisply till the fadeout.

They wrote, "Otto Preminger, director, does an excellent job of pacing the story and of building sympathy for Andrews.

"[8] Harrison's Reports called the film "one of the most taut and absorbing crime melodramas produced in many a moon," with "exceptionally good" dialogue.